Surfing the Next Wave

Until very recently, and not including Apple’s cool minimalism, the tech industry gave a backseat to design. But Yves Béhar has made his reputation with iconic devices—the One Laptop per Child computer, the Jawbone headset, the Up fitness band—that are sexier, curvier, and more human. Visiting Béhar’s San Francisco office, Kara Swisher explores his increasing influence and checks out his latest creation.

RIDING HIGH Yves Béhar, founder of Fuseproject, photographed with a Local Bike—his sleek, modern take on a traditional cargo bike—at Baker Beach, in San Francisco.

Although Yves Béhar is a creator of meticulously crafted objects, his hair is pure chaos. In a way, this tonsorial disaster is an apt metaphor for the tangled web of ideas that have exploded from the head of the lanky Swiss-born designer—resulting in some of technology’s most striking and memorable designs over the last two decades, including the One Laptop per Child computer, the Jawbone wireless headset, the Up fitness band, and the Ouya game player. It’s all the more impressive when one considers that, until very recently, design has taken a backseat in Silicon Valley, where the result has been either not much to speak of or products that mimic (usually badly) Apple’s signature absolutist ethos of stark simplicity.

Béhar has gone in a decidedly different direction from that, making sexier, curvier, more luscious and tactile objects. In doing so, he has defined a design style that subliminally suggests the natural landscape of his adoptive California—both its gently rolling hills and its dangerously sharp coastlines.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Béhar in his design studio at Fuseproject.

Béhar’s new headquarters, in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill area, a sweeping and airy conversion of a giant warehouse whose lobby also serves as an art gallery, undoubtedly have more in common with the offices of his neighbors Airbnb and Zynga than with traditional design companies. The place is buzzing with designers, and various projects are arrayed in cubes on the walls at the outer edges, complete with shops to fabricate those ideas. “Technology is essentially hard to understand, unattractive, insensitive to human needs in its raw state—right?” Béhar says. “And it’s all about how you take technology and turn it into something magical, attractive, with a sense of humanity attached to it.”

Béhar’s worldview is in line with a concept that Silicon Valley has modishly dubbed the Internet of Things. His latest effort, called August, is a perfect example: a next-generation home-entry system in the form of a perfectly round device that replaces the dead-bolt part of a lock. With no special installation required, it opens on command from a cell-phone app and arguably has the potential to change the way people have treated home security since the invention of the lock and key in ancient Mesopotamia.

This is precisely what Béhar prioritizes above all else in his work. “Good design accelerates the adoption of new ideas,” he says. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of M.I.T.’s Media Lab and Béhar’s partner in One Laptop per Child, puts it another way: “Great ideas lurk in our peripheral vision, not reached through incremental thinking, but audacious jumps. Yves takes those.”

Yves Béhar’s notebook sketches of the Herman Miller Sayl chair (inspired by the suspension system of the Golden Gate Bridge).

Photo: Courtesy of FuseProject

The Herman Miller Sayl chair.

Photo: Courtesy of FuseProject

Mini Jambox sketches.

Photo: Courtesy of FuseProject

Sketches and models of Up by Jawbone.

Courtesy of FuseProject

Yves Béhar’s notebook sketches of the Herman Miller Sayl chair (inspired by the suspension system of the Golden Gate Bridge).

Courtesy of FuseProject

The Herman Miller Sayl chair.

Courtesy of FuseProject

Mini Jambox sketches.

Courtesy of FuseProject

Béhar, who grew up in Switzerland, has always had an impulse to tinker and challenge the status quo. “I’m a bit of a contrarian,” he says. “And it’s hard to be a contrarian in a country that doesn’t change.” After first moving to California to attend art school in Los Angeles, he moved to San Francisco in 1993. He found work with several design firms in the Bay Area, which were attracting an increasing portion of their clientele from the many tech companies headquartered there. The only problem was, although they were seeking design help, few of them were interested in what Béhar had to offer.

“You were forcing design down people’s throats,” he remembers. “The first thing people would do is look at you straight in the eye and say, ‘What’s the [return on investment] on design?’ And, you know, there was no R.O.I. on design. It made me realize in some ways that we were just being asked to do the outsides,” he says. “We were just essentially decorators of products at that point.”

Rather than try to work within a system he considered wrongheaded, Béhar sought to re-invent it. In 1999 he struck out on his own, founding Fuseproject, a design-and-branding firm in the hip South Park section of San Francisco. He wanted to position himself more as a co-founder, involved in funding and coming up with ideas, not just acting as a hired gun for design. It was simply a matter of finding the right project to justify making that next leap.

In 2002 he met Hosain Rahman, the hyperkinetic co-founder of Jawbone, who was seeking to upend the mobile-headset market and needed a creative partner. Until then, most cell-phone earpieces were clunky attachments that made the wearer look like a badly outfitted cyborg.

Béhar was drawn to the challenge of designing something that was both technically complex and sensually beautiful. “This is where this design is so hard, because you have rigid electronic components that need to stay connected together and function together,” he says.

Béhar became chief creative officer at the start-up. He envisioned the Jawbone device as a “facial accessory,” effectively turning an appliance into a luxury good (and its cost from impediment to asset). And, just like that, design morphed into ideology.

Rahman and Béhar employed a slick and sexy branding campaign and you-may-possibly-not-be-worthy packaging that portrayed the mobile headset as an item of chic jewelry, to be worn only by those with a sense of style.

The Jawbone earpiece—which managed to combine comfort, state-of-the-art technology, and sexiness—was a runaway success and definitively put Béhar on the map of tech design. In the years since, he has continued to push boundaries and defy predictability in any number of ways—with everything from a sleek and ubiquitous office chair for Herman Miller to a bullet-shaped Sodastream carbonator.

Throughout, his principal goal has remained the same. He still thinks much of what is designed in the tech world, including Google Glass, is simply too inhuman: “They’re not thought from that human-centered standpoint, which is: How do I want this to fit in my life? And is it obtrusive to me, or is it obtrusive to other people that are across from me? Is it the right fashion statement for me? Does it create the right conversation between me and my environment or the people around me?” The questions Béhar asks himself go on and on, and he never stops asking them.